I recently had a friend e-mail me a simple link to a place on the Internet called YouTube. I had visited the site before but had never really done any research on the videos. After watching the video of a man dancing to some old music, I started looking around to see if there was anything funny to watch.

What I found was mind blowing.

I couldn’t believe there were people out there that would want to look up things like how to make your own crossbow out of school supplies or how to hide your marijuana so that cops can’t find or smell it on you.

It was sad to me to find that kids or young teens had created most of the videos on the page.

That meant that they had to think up something to make their video about, and the only thing they could come up with was something violent or even deadly. I sat down and studied these videos for a while, and after learning how to create a deadly crossbow out of school supplies from a 13 year old, I decided that there are more problems with our youth then we even give them credit for.

People are always asking how a person can just snap and walk into a classroom and start shooting people that they have known all of their life. Well, when they start out at 13 making deadly crossbows for fun, then what are they supposed to upgrade to? Everything else to them just seems boring.

I am one who is up for children being able to use the Internet for research and even to play games, but I think all sites should inspect the information being placed on their site and should put an age lock on things that younger people just shouldn’t be seeing or learning how to do.

I know I wouldn’t want my son getting online to play a game or do a paper for school and instead come out learning how to grow marijuana or how to create your own special hiding places for things like drugs or money.

If you allow your kids to do things online, make sure you are with them or that you have some Web sites blocked from their use. It may never hurt anything to let them see what the world is like from the videos that are online, but then again, it might make your child be the one thinking up the ideas, trying them out and then placing videos about them online.